Zac and Vanessa talk about their experience at the presentation of Zeega.org and its alpha release. Scott challenges the scalability of Universal Design for Learning, and we talk about the landscape of open source textbooks.
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When Secretary Duncan spoke at the Askwith Forum here at the Ed School, every seat was filled. Tickets were raffled off and his talk was streamed for those who didn’t make it in the room.
As expected during an election year (not sure which years aren’t), Sec. Duncan’s talk was light on anything that could be taken as disruptive thinking. The title of “Fighting the Wrong Education Battles” was fleshed out not with a clear cry for which battles were worth fighting, but for compromise and ceding of ideology.
It was the stump speech I expected and that Sec. Duncan needed to make in an age when leadership has become conflated with keeping power. Because I understood the politics of the moment, I wasn’t surprised by the speech.
The underwhelming feeling came from the audience’s response. It almost felt as though being in the room negated the potential to disagree. Access trumped democracy. When we arrived at the Q&A portion, questions were largely driven by personal interests and not thoughtful engagement with the positions the Secretary had outlined.
This was expected. As columnist David Brooks noted at his Askwith, I’ve been at Harvard enough to know people were there to hear themselves talk.
All that was not what frustrated me.
The next day, Wynton Marsalis joined with a distinguished panel for another forum titled “Educating for Moral Agency and Engaged Citizenship.”
Marsalis and the rest of the panel explored education from the perspective of jazz, the arts, and non-religious spiritual education. They challenged notions of masculinity and community involvement and considered how educators and officials could shift the way they listen in a move to improve students’ learning.
It was exteporaneous and free-flowing. Tangents were followed. Ideas explored. Standards challenged.
…rows empty.
Whereas a stump speech brought out throngs and was streamed and archived, I can’t post the footage of the Marsalis panel because I can’t find it.
I wish I could.
If we continue to flock to those in power who are encumbered in the service of multiple masters for inspiration and solutions, the future we hope for will continue to exist on a far distant horizon.
If more and more we realized the value and wisdom of engaging with those who are in an of the doing of the work, that horizon would be far closer.
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For this week’s episode of Learning Grounds, we sat down with Education Policy and Management candidate, Anesha, to discuss what she’s learning about ideas of school choice and policy’s role in creating equity in the opportunities facing kids today. We also had time to talk about the role of schools in cultural competency.
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For the first episode of the podcast we spent a cup of coffee with Harvard Graduate School of Education student Megan. Over the course of a grandé, we discussed Megan’s drive to implement a truer inclusion program for special needs students as well as the difficulties of professional collaboration when new teachers meet existing systems.
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Three different sources sent me news of Sebastian Thrun leaving Stanford in favor of literally bigger, if not better things. I dig Thrun’s move for the moment because it throws light on the idea of moving outside the currently restricted system of education delivery. It’s not new, what he’s doing, but it’s new to him, and likely most of the readers who are flabbergasted by the move.
Today was a moment where I experienced first-hand some of the conundrums possible if disruptions like Thrun’s take hold.
For the moment, I’m cross-registered at the Kennedy School of Government in a course called Solving Problems Using Digital Technology. While the title may not be incredibly sexy, the course is. Forged in a partnership with Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s New Urban Mechanics office and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), the class is pretty much everything I could hope for in a learning environment. Studying tech tools and open government practices, students are charged with partnering with the DSNI to help shape the neighborhood’s plan for continued urban renewal.
The learning and work of the class will have a direct impact on improving the lives of those we study and make the learning immediately practical in our lives.
Today was the course’s first meeting.
The room was packed.
The course is capped at 32.
I am a cross-registrant.
When such popularity happens in a Kennedy School course, registration moves to some strange bidding process akin to an academic auction I am not completely clear about.
Cross-registrants need not concern themselves, the process pretty much precludes them from obtaining spots in the class.
My hope at this point is teeny.
The course will be made public in many ways. Sessions will be aired via a Google+ Hangout and their recordings posted on youtube for viewing. The course has a twitter handle and its site lives on Google (outside of the Kennedy School’s walled system).
Each of these is a reason I want to take the course and ostensibly a reason it shouldn’t matter that, like Thurn’s students I’m not actually present or enrolled for credit in the course.
Except, I’m looking to complete my program of study this academic year, and no matter the proof, attempting to show informal participation in a course in order to obtain credit means that learning won’t move me closer to that goal.
Without the credit, I miss the diploma. Without the diploma, I lose the blip on the CV still valued by the majority of the world.
Learning matters.
Credits and accreditation matter.
While both are important, the combination of both is more powerful than either could hope to be on its own.
I’m not sure what I’ll do if I don’t make it into the class. If I say I’ll follow along as an outsider, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the work of my for-credit courses creep in. I wonder what the rate of creepage is for registrants in Thurn’s courses when whatever qualifies as their “for-credit” commitments begin to creep in.
One of the most important things I learned last semester was put to our class by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot as the two most important statements of which a ethnographers should be mindful:
If this seems strange, I ask why. If this doesn’t seem strange, I ask why.
Give it the time and space it needs to sink in, and I think that couplet of statements will play the same havoc in your brain that it’s been playing in mine the last few months.
This will not become the sum of my treatise on how I evaluate the world. It has become an important lens through which I view those beliefs I hold and those I argue against.
The couplet invokes the eternal “Why?” and goes a step further to keep it always focused on the strangeness or lack thereof in any situation.
From where did normalcy arise and what makes me suppose it is absent?
My first inclination is to praise the advent of YouTube for Schools. I want to say, “Finally, we can get the content to the classrooms.” And that is true. At least, it’s more likely.
I can’t say that without also pointing out it was easier for one of the world’s largest corporations to change content streams, test and market a new product, and launch it than it was for America’s schools to consider changing how they think about the Internet.
There’s a reason other nations are outperforming America in tests of thinking.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
– Angela Carter
Just because I’m not in classes at the moment doesn’t mean I’m not reading. It does mean I’m not reading anything that anyone has assigned to me.
It also means I’m sneaking some fiction into my brain. Tomorrow, I’ll pick up Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Some of my favorite students gushed over the book, but I never took the time to read it while I was in the classroom. Somehow, picking it up without the title of “Teacher” attached to my actions makes the reading seem more pure. I’m not reading it to teach in the next few months. No unit or lesson plans will rely on what I get from the experience. I’m reading it to be entertained.
One of the more frequent state standards (and now a Common Core standard) is identifying author’s purpose. (There’s a whole philosophical argument I could make against this, but that’s another post.)
As I anticipate delving into Card’s imagined dystopia tomorrow, I’ve started to think about the importance of asking students to identify reader’s purpose.
If a student is reading a non-fiction text in class, the answer to the question should be, “Because I’m curious,” or “Because it’s interesting.” Some off shoot thereof makes the most sense.
Reader’s purpose in school is most often, “I’m reading this because my teacher said,” or “It was assigned.”
That shifts the experience considerably. I’m looking forward to losing myself in the imagination of tomorrow’s reading, to meeting new characters and trying to figure out how pieces of the narrative puzzle fit together.
Most importantly, I’ll be shifting my purpose from word to word, chapter to chapter. The journey through the book will inform what I want out of it and what I expect.
Were I reading for someone else because the book had been assigned me, the journey would be emptier. I’d be reading to run someone else’s literary errands, hoping to keep the change when all was said and done.
A balanced reading diet is important. Compelling others to read what they are told is forcing them to eat their vegetables. It’s a great way to get people to hate their vegetables.
The stakes in student teaching are high. Student teaching will color teachers’ perceptions of students’ capacity to learn, shape their expectations for their own performance and help determine the type of school in which they will choose to teach.
– National Council on Teacher Quality
The quality of teacher preparation programs came up over and over again throughout my courses this semester. Common complaints:
My own preparation experience at Illinois State University was a strong one. I was required to spend over 120 hours observing and delivering drop-in lessons at partner schools near campus including the University’s own laboratory schools. While I never had any practice teaching my peers as they pretended to be students, I had plenty of opportunities to teach students as they acted like themselves.
Each outing in another teacher’s classroom was followed up by written reflection, conversation with the teacher, and class discussion with my fellow pre-service teachers and our professor.
It wasn’t a perfect experience. My peers and I started to see the cracks in the program the closer we got to graduation and thereby knowing everything. We wished our professors had more experience in classrooms to balance their well-meaning theories with the realities we found each time we ventured to the head of a classroom. We knew we wanted to see Individual Education Plans and 504s before we were on our own and faced with the task of informing their drafting. Most of all, we wanted to know what each other was doing and how we could best begin the time-tested practice of teacher stealing.
I’m not in disagreement with many of my classmates’ complaints from undergrad or grad school. I’ve started thinking about what I would do were I in charge of reforming or revamping a school of education based on these complaints. So far, I’ve two suggestions.
-1-
Require each teacher seeking certification to also complete certification requirements in special education or English for speakers of other languages instruction. Not completing either of these certifications when I was in college has always been a regret. What I learned in both areas I had to learn amid the process of learning to teach. It would have increased my program requirements, but it would have been worth it.
I’ve got a hunch it wouldn’t have been worth it for those people in my program who weren’t too keen on actually becoming classroom teachers after graduation. Requiring special ed and/or ESOL certification from all graduates would help cut down on program applicants as well. Those looking at teaching as a fall-back position would be less likely to do so if it meant more work. Those who apply and complete the program would enter the classroom better prepared to meet the needs of their students and speak the teacher-ese that makes up much of the learning curve as new teachers start out.
Such a requirement might also lead programs to rejigger their schedules of coursework to keep the requirements manageable and have the added benefit of more cross-curricular work.
-2-
Require every student teacher to blog. Require that blogging to be shared amongst the other student teachers in their program. Require every cooperating and supervising teacher to comment on every post written by any student teacher in his or her charge.
When I was going through my program, ISU had the sixth-highest rate of teacher graduates in the country. Dozens of people were completing their student teaching in small towns and cities across the state at the same time as me.
Aside from one friend with whom I carpooled to school, I had contact with none of them until the whole experience was over. I should have. I should have also been required to reflect on my practice at least once a week and those stories should have been archived for the classes that came after me.
When I became a student teacher, I might as well have been the first man on the moon for as much institutional knowledge as I took with me into the experience.
Requiring all student teachers to blog about their practice in concert with their peers in similar situations can create a culture of interaction and reflection that’s so easy to forget amid all that is clamoring for attention during those weeks. The comments they receive can help them refine their practice and feel part of community. For those who follow, the records of reflection can act as case studies and what-if scenarios leading up to student teaching.
Building these habits of transparency, reflection, and collaboration while their teaching identities are in the most nascent stages will help increase the likelihood those habits will carry over into their professional practice.
—
These are two beginning thoughts on how education can improve how it prepares its next generations. I’ll keep thinking.
We believe that ‘humanity of scale’ and the ‘primacy of relationships’ should not only inform the design of our schools but should also influence our public sector services.
– Human Scale Education Movement
Earlier in the semester, as I was working on my argument for collaboration as a key principle in the design of my theory of learning, Chris MacIntosh hit me up with a link to this wonderful paper from Human Scale Education in the UK.
I hadn’t the time to delve too deeply into the people at HSE as I was writing the paper, but I’ve since gone back, and I’ve got to say, I am really digging the work they do.
In the paper, HSE Director James Wetz frames his argument around the following themes:
Certainly, these theories aren’t new. The relational aspect of education was appreciated by everyone from John Dewey to Ivan Illich. What struck me as contemporarily important about Wetz’s work was the practical applications. He writes about interviewing Linda Nathan at the Boston Arts Academy and Ann Cook at Urban Academy in New York as people putting these theories into practice.
The paper is a brief 11 pages, and well worth reading. Also worth looking after is HSE’s first free school opening in Dorset in 2013.